Little Fires Everywhere
12 February 2019 5 Comments
Title: Little Fires Everywhere
Author: Celeste Ng
Summary: In the placid, progressive suburb of Shaker Height everything this meticulously planned, from the colours of the houses, to the successful lives of its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson.
Mia Warren, an enigmatic artist and single mother, arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenage daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon, Mia and Peral become more than just tenants: all four Richardson children and drawn to the alluring mother-daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a disregard for the rules that threaten to upend this carefully ordered community.
When the Richardsons’ friends attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle errupts that dramatically divides the town and puts Mia and Mrs Richardson on opposing sides. Mrs Richardson becomes determined to uncover the secrets in Mia’s past. But her obsession with come at unexpected and devastating costs to her own family–and Mia’s.
Rating: ★★★☆☆ 3.5/5
Review: I read and loved Ng’s first novel, Everything I Never Told You, so I was really excited to get hold of her second book and set about reading it.
Compared to the previous book, with its incredible first-line hook, this was a slow burn. The first chapter, starting at the end of the story, sets out a lot of questions about how the book will get us there, but didn’t immediately strike me with a ‘must keep reading’ feeling.
Getting to know the characters, their situations, and their motivations was also a slow process. With eight characters at the forefront of the narrative (plus a few more important ones introduced along the way), this was important ground work, and the set up was worth it for the pay off. But it was still challenging to get past that and really get into the story.
It wasn’t until chapter seven, when we properly meet the elusive Izzy, that things really picked up for me. Ahead of this we’d met the other members of the Richardson family, all of whom were well-do-to, average, and utterly boring. Of course there was also the Warren mother/daughter duo who, while not exactly driving the plot along, were more interesting and mysterious. It was Izzy, though, with her fire, independence, caring, and no-shits-to-give attitude who really intrigued me.
The title, most obviously and as revealed in the opening chapter, refers to how the fire at the Richardson’s home was set, but more accurately it is about the smaller plots of the book. The simmering, unspoken feud between Mrs Richardson and Mia; the family dynamics of the Richardsons; the teenage drama, hormones, and life-changing mistakes of all the children; the legal proceedings and claims to an abandoned baby; and–most fascinating to me–Mia’s history. These were the real little fires, everywhere around Shaker Heights.
I loved the overall ending–how all those little fires burnt and spread and changed everything forever. But most of all I loved how open a lot of things were. We know the ideas people head, where they planned to go and what they hoped would happen, but we can’t follow them there. I like to imagine the best for Mia and Pearl and Izzy… I like to imagine the others will get by, but never in quite the same way.
The last few days I’ve had a severe headache and lethargy, and all I could really bring myself to do was read, so I actually ended up reading over half of this book in pretty much one sitting. I’m not sure if this has affected my opinions on the book or not, but I do think I might have struggled to read more than a chapter a day otherwise. As it was, I couldn’t manage much else, so I let myself get lost in this book while I wasn’t well.
While I didn’t enjoy this book as much as Everything I Never Told You, I did enjoy it. Ng knows what she’s doing and crafts a well thought out, intriguing, and genuine set of characters and events. I’ll look forward to her next novel.